Hello everyone !
The brand new Alpha 14 is live !
Here's some of the biggest additions to this build:
-Reworked the brightness, contrast and lighting in the game, background generation and how planets look. We also tweaked the bump and specular maps of most of the ship models in the game.
-Reworked some menus, such as the Research menu and the Empire menu and brightened them up signficantly.
Don't worry though, we are far from done with the improvements in this area and you'll see more changes in the coming builds.
-We have several tentative fixes for the crashes some people have been encountering. We also disabled Steam Achievements for this build as one of the possible causes for the crashes is the Steam API. They will be reactivated as soon as we find out if they are causing stability issues or not.
-The keyboard input and click lag issues should be fixed.
-Did some major optimization in several areas, the game should now run significantly faster.
-You'll notice there's two new buttons in the Empire Management menu, namely "Budget Adjustment" and "Trade Routes". These are some of the new features we'll be introducing in the upcoming builds.
-Other than that there's some bug fixes and changes under the hood to pave the way for what's coming.
Like I said in the previous announcement, we're going to start to release more incremental and frequent updates. We expect to release Alpha 15 next week.
As always, your feedback is very important for us, if you encounter any new issues in this new build please let us know.
It's specially important for us to know if the crashes fixes and optimizations worked for you.
Well that's all from me, hope you enjoy this new build :)
Thanks !
Update: There were two game breaking bugs introduced in this build, we've since updated the build with the fixes to these issues. If you are still running into issues, let us know.